444 - Clueless (Encore)
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Hey, this is John. Back in April 2020, Craig and I did a deep dive on 1995's Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Now, we recorded this episode during those early weeks of the pandemic, and it was honestly nice to have something so fun and familiar to focus on. The truth is, though, it is always a good time to revisit Clueless. And this week feels particularly relevant with Wicked coming out. It is co-written by our very own Dana Fox, in fact. And it's a great time to revisit Clueless.

And as I mentioned in this episode you're about to listen to, it is hard to imagine Wicked's incarnation of Glinda without the template forged by Cher Horowitz. So enjoy this Encore episode. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode, episode 666. I can't imagine what the topic will be for that. Enjoy. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. Oh.

My name is Craig Mazin, and this is episode 444 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, it's a deep dive on one of my favorite movies of all time, 1995's Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling. And that is all we are going to talk about today. These deep dive episodes are standalone, so if you're listening to this in 2033, we will not be referencing the current situation that we're in. As far as you know, everything is fine. Everything's fine. You're just...

Talking about clueless. It's a normal day. It's a clueless day.

And for our premium members, we're going to have a bonus segment where Craig and I talk about learning to drive, which is, of course, a key plot point in the film Clueless. Indeed. Indeed. Craig, let's set the table about why we are talking about Clueless, because you just rewatched it. I know this movie from watching it a thousand times. To me, this movie is a masterclass in many things that we want to let our listeners really appreciate Clueless.

I really think about tone and POV in this movie and sort of how well it does everything. The narration we'll get into, this is a movie that would not be possible without its narrator, without being able to see inside Cher's head. I'm always in awe of the denseness of its comedy, like just the way it's joke, joke, joke. There are no scenes that are like joke-less.

And it's also just a terrific adaptation. So Clueless is, of course, based on Jane Austen's Emma. It is a weirdly faithful adaptation and yet such a smart adaptation. So as we look at updating all projects, Clueless is a great model. Well, to talk about why the tone of Clueless and the comedy of Clueless and the characters of Clueless were...

works so well, I think you have to start with one of the great heroes of American film comedy, Amy Heckerling. Yeah. In a just world, Amy Heckerling is mentioned right up there with Billy Wilder and Harold Ramis and every great male director of comedy ever because she's that important. I think so. Yeah. So as a writer and a director, just

phenomenal work throughout this. And also you look at the impact this film has had. I think it'd be hard to imagine a Wicked or a Glee without Clueless sort of just tilling some soil ahead of them. You look at Glinda in Wicked and there is a template being forged by Cher and Clueless that is so, I think, relevant to this in terms of having a central character who is charming and popular and yet still needs to grow. And that feels like an obvious thing. Then of course,

the way it sort of revitalized how we do a high school comedy is another way that Clueless is so important, that these are characters who do speak like they are much more educated than they really would be. That, to me, you know,

It was incredibly important to a whole generation of high school comedies. Right. And it was the second time that Amy Heckerling did this. I mean, the first time was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Amy Heckerling is such a good writer and such a good director, it kind of blows my mind. So she made Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982, which is well before Clueless.

And that was a kind of early definer of what a high school comedy should be. It sort of blew the doors off of what high school portrayal was and also launched the career of Cameron Crowe. Johnny Dangerously is a terribly underrated and so therefore vastly awesome spoof movie that happened. It just didn't connect at the time in the theaters, but it's since become a rightful cult classic. So there's your laugh a minute vibe.

And she's just kind of amazing at portraying families together, portraying young adults. And you're absolutely right. The template that Cher creates has gone on forward now. When you say Glinda from Wicked, it's so true because Glinda and Cher have this thing, which is

They're incredibly popular. They're incredibly beautiful. They're self-involved. They are superficial, but they're not bad. And that's the thing about Cher that's so fascinating is that she wore the kind of accoutrement of a bad person, except she wasn't bad. She just hadn't yet had her eyes opened.

Exactly. So this movie has been important for me for two different reasons. So this was a movie that I first saw when it came out. And I remember seeing it in the theater, but I mostly remember seeing it the second time. So I'd driven out to Los Angeles in my rusted out Honda Accord. And by the time I was living in my third apartment in Los Angeles, I'd gotten hired to write the adaptation of How to Eat Fried Worms. I may have already started working on A Wrinkle in Time. And so I had enough money coming in that I was able to buy myself, lease myself a Volkswagen Jetta, which...

Everybody in Los Angeles at that time, at least the exact same folks back in Jetta, they were really cheap. And I could sell my old Honda Accord. And so on one Saturday morning, I sold my Honda Accord for like $1,500 and it was cash. And I had the cash money. I'd never held that much cash in my hand at one time. And I decided to use some of that money to take all my friends to see Clueless with me again. So it was one of those rare movies where I saw it twice in a weekend. And I just remember taking that Honda Accord money to see that movie. Wow.

The second point of connection to Clueless for me was in 2010, I was asked by Outfest, the gay and lesbian film festival in Los Angeles, if I wanted to screen a classic gay movie and give a talk about it. And so I picked Clueless, which seems like a weird movie to pick because it's not on its surface a gay movie, but...

What I argued in the show notes for it is that true to its title, Clueless doesn't know how gay it is. 1995, clever reworking of Jane Austen's Emma gives us Alicia Silverstone as the stylist for Shallow Cher Horowitz.

So to me, it is a very important movie for a whole generation of gay men as well. So that's another sort of big point of connection for Clueless for me.

Yeah. And as a straight guy, I do remember when I saw the movie when it came out, of course. And so I was and we were pretty much the same age. So I was 23. And I remember thinking that this was the maybe the first portrayal of a teenage gay young man that wasn't the gay. Do you know what I mean? It was just he was just a guy. Yeah.

He was a guy. Yeah, it came at a very right angle. And so we'll talk about sort of the Christian character, but they set up in a way that like, once you understand he's gay, it's like, oh, I see what she was doing. I see what he was doing. Right. But it wasn't sort of the stereotypical gay character. Yeah. So let's talk about how the script came to be. So when we refer to the script, the best script I've been able to find is an August 1994 script. It's 123 pages. We'll have a link to that in the show notes.

It very closely approximates what the final script is. There's a lot of transcripts online, and transcripts are useless. Never look at transcripts. Only look at actual screenplays that writers have written. The backstory on this is Heckerling apparently wrote this as a TV pilot for a TV show called No Worries. It was later retitled I Was a Teenage Teenager. And it was the Cher character. It was all the characters that are in the story, but it wasn't Emma, surprisingly. So she writes...

It was about this girl that was completely happy no matter what happened. I was really getting into that kind of character, but nothing happened with it. Fox passed on it. They didn't get it. And things were falling through. I got very frustrated. And so she started thinking about the larger context of rose-colored glasses, that nothing could go wrong. And she went back to Emma, which she'd read in college. She took it out, reread it, and she said, unconsciously, I've been writing an Emma-like character. And then she took, basically, what she'd already sort of planned out for this No Worries and sort of

really made Cher an Emma character and sort of built Emma around it. And it worked just so brilliantly. Yeah. And this would become the first of a long series of such adaptations. This kind of kicked off a craze that led to lots of Shakespeare, for instance, being... Yeah, 10 Things I Hate About You. Correct. Lots of things being turned into teenage comedies. But this was the first, and I would argue the best...

And, again, there's this stroke of genius here where Peckerling, she has a vision of something, and I love that nobody else saw it. This is one of these movies where, as we get into the specifics of it, we'll see this come up over and over. It's such a great example of what I call a movie consistent to itself. It does not follow rules completely.

All the time. In fact, lots of times it seems to break a lot of rules. It can be episodic as hell. It doesn't matter. It is true to itself. It's such a thing unto itself. And so I'm not surprised that for a while people were looking at this character or this kind of story even and thinking,

what is this? But she knew. I mean, again, hats off to Amy Heckerling. Unbelievable. Absolutely. So the movie opened at $10 million this opening weekend. It went on to make $56 million at the box office, which is good. It did really well. And so, but I think it's had a much longer life since that time because you watch the movie now and it's,

doesn't feel dated in the way you'd expect a movie from that era to feel dated. Other than the phones being wrong, it really reads as a very contemporary movie. Yeah, no, I mean, it's actually remarkable how you can look at this movie through the lens of woke 2020. And you know what? Hey, here's a big shock.

because it was written and directed by a woman. And so, remarkably, it is not soaking in any kind of misogynistic horseshit. Yeah. And it's also based on, you know, a Jane Austen novel written by a woman. So it has a sensibility that is both timeless and timely. It works really, really well. Yeah. So let's quickly go through how this movie maps up to

to Emma. And there's also a new adaptation of Emma that people can check out as well, which I've not seen. I'm really going to be curious to see how Clueless influences that adaptation of Emma. The Cher Howard's character matches to Emma Woodhouse. She's the central character. She's charming. She's beautiful. She's popular. She can read as selfish, which becomes a thing, but she is able to grow. And as we're talking about with Glinda, she's a character who starts with a

She sort of seems to have everything and then she recognizes what she doesn't have. And that is sort of the crisis that she faces over the course of the story. Yeah, I mean, this is a great example of a character that's like a coiled spring. And the coiled spring of Emma or Cher is that she is beautiful and she is a good person at her core and clearly is deserving of love.

And yet spends all of her time getting other people together in love, which is in its own way an interesting kind of defense mechanism. I'm going to work on making you happy. And this way I don't have to have any vulnerability for myself.

But that's a wonderful coiled spring. We all know from the beginning how that will end. It doesn't matter. See, people get confused. They think that predictability is bad. Predictability isn't the problem. The problem is that sometimes something is predictable. And also, we have no interest in watching the coil uncoil. But in this, we want to see it uncoil. We want to see that pop open. And of course, we get to. Yeah.

Now, next up, we have Josh, who matches up to Mr. Knightley. So this is the love interest who has to seem like it's not a possible love interest at the start. And so in Emma's, it's like he's a brother-like character. He's a close family friend, so therefore would not be appropriate. In this movie, he is her stepbrother from a marriage that was...

over five years ago. It's interesting that my daughter, as I said, we were going to record this, she's like, yeah, but she falls for her stepbrother. Like, that's just weird. But that's actually one of the, I think, the most daring things about this movie. And also in rewatching it, you recognize how carefully Heckerling planted the seeds for this so that you weren't ahead of it, but you were actually fine with it when it happened. And also,

how smartly written and how smartly played Josh's character is. It tracks well in terms of where he's at and where, you know, you can sort of see the story from his point of view, even though he doesn't have point of view scenes. The whole movie is from Cher's point of view, essentially. But in the scenes we get with him, we can see what his progress is. Yeah, she'll give us glimpses from his point of view. And the glimpses are usually him noticing, essentially he catches Cher being good.

He notices, I mean, there's a great moment where Cher outwits the college girl and or outnows the college girl. And that's a moment where Amy shifts her camera over to Paul Rudd to see him noticing and letting that in, which is smart. By the way, Paul Rudd, I mean, people have talked about the fact that he doesn't age legitimately enough.

what the hell? Yeah. It's actually kind of terrifying. Yeah. I mean, looking at this movie again today, it looks like he's smoothed a bit. As you look at Clueless, it looks like he had a little bit of a Gaussian filter sort of put on him. But otherwise, he is exactly the same person. It's terrifying. And I think actually,

One of the things that's interesting is I don't know how old he was when he was in Clueless, but he seems older looking than he should. I think what happened was Paul Rudd was born at the age of 35. Yeah. But will always be 35. Yeah.

Yeah. Terrifying. It's a good choice to make, I think. Yeah. No, it's wonderful to watch the two of them together. Look, there is a very strange premise that's put forth. And Amy does something that a lot of movies do where she essentially, these are not the droids you're looking for to the audience. So Dan Hedaya plays Cher's dad. Cher's mother died many, many years ago before Cher even knew her. And...

Then apparently Cher's dad gets married to some lady and that marriage ends five years before this movie starts. But for some reason, he still likes having his stepson come over because as he says, you divorce the woman, not the child. Yeah. Sure. But like...

Really? I mean, I'm sure that happens, but it goes by very quickly to the point where, honestly, I was a little, I had to piece it together exactly to see what was going on. But once you kind of buy it,

which is not a huge buy, you're good. Everything's fine. Absolutely. Characters who are also brought through from Emma, there is the woman who she sort of sets up in a love relationship. So that's Miss Geist, who is Miss Taylor, Miss Weston, and Emma. There's the object of her makeover. So that's Ty or Harriet Smith, played by Brittany Murphy, who is just phenomenal in this part. There's

The Travis character, Breckenmeyer's character, Brecken is fantastic in this. And this was before we cast him in Go, and he's so different and so great in both parts. There's an equivalent character in Emma, which is Robert Martin. There's Elton, whose character's name is Philip Elton in Emma. This is actually one of the characters that actually feels the most like aristocracy snobbery. It's one of the characters who sort of most comes across like, oh, you're just an asshole for me to start. Yeah, no, he's clearly a bad guy.

And then Christian's character is probably closest matched up to Frank Churchill. Again, it is the subject of infatuation and love and the person she's going after who's not going to be available. And it's a frustration to...

the Emma Cher character, but someone who seems like, again, it's the person who seems like the appropriate love interest so that we aren't aware of who she should really be going for. Yeah, and that's a very smart kind of updating because the kernel of that is, again, exploring why somebody wants

is opting for unavailable people or is opting to put other people in love together. Like for instance, in this story, the wonderful, you know, couple of teachers and it just keeps tensioning that coil. It's hard for her to make herself available to somebody that is available to her. So it's all very smart updating because in the book, and I'm cheating off of your notes here because I haven't read it in forever. Um,

The character that Christian is taken from was engaged. So that's why he was not available. I think Gay is a much better choice for a film in 1995. Yes. So before we get into sort of a sequence breakdown of Gay,

Let's talk about sort of how the movie works overall, sort of on a macro level. And let's start with talking about Cher as our point of view character and especially her voiceover, her narration. Because to try to imagine this movie without the narration, it's just a completely different experience. If you don't have the insight into what the character is actually thinking, she seems like a monster. And then what do you end with?

But when you see what's actually going on inside, you realize like, oh, she's not mean at all. She's actually so generous and she's trying so hard. What I noticed this last time watching through it is

the narration is all told in the past. Like these are things that did happen. So she's in the past tense, except that as she's narrating, she's aware of things that are right in front of her. So she might say, oh, I wonder if they have that in my size. So it's a really interesting choice that kind of shouldn't work and yet it works great. And so it's like she's kind of watching something

the story with you and that she's in the moment with you as she's narrating. Yeah. So her voiceover typically will explain why a scene you're about to see is happening. So she'll say, I decided I would go to the mall to make myself feel better. Then we're at the mall. Or she will be talking about something after it happened. After the experiment with so-and-so failed, I felt that blah, blah, blah. So it's like she's kind of bookending these moments and

The breaking of the fourth wall with, oh, I wonder if they have that in my size will be no surprise to anybody who is a Heckerling fan and who has seen Johnny Dangerously because she's so good at that sort of thing. And it's very easy to overdo it or to do it wrongly. And she did it beautifully there. I loved it.

Absolutely. So even as the camera is pushing through a place, she might linger on a sticker bar because Cher is hungry. So it's a very, the whole movie is her point of view. And so even if the camera is moving through a space, it's essentially Cher's point of view. Yeah, it's kind of a Lord and Miller meta style, except 20 years earlier. Yep.

Now, what's important to know about Cher is that she's naive, but she's not dumb. And I think that's one of the most important things that carries through from Emma to this update is that she has a very sophisticated vocabulary. She will occasionally use words incorrectly, but overall, she has just an unrealistically really robust command of language, both in her voiceover and in how she's actually speaking. She's also good at reading people. Like, she'll miss some things. She'll obviously miss

Christian being gay, but she does have a sense of interpersonal dynamics. When she's trying to set up this guy, Mr. Hall, she really does have a sense of like what's going to work with people. So she has an emotional intelligence for other people that she doesn't have for herself. Yeah. And that is an interesting line that Amy walks with Cher because at times she does show that Cher is ignorant.

Which is different than dumb. It's pretty clear that as the daughter of this hard-charging Beverly Hills attorney that she's inherited quite a bit of this negotiation wisdom. She's got kind of a steel-trapped mind. I mean, when she gets up and does her little oral reports in class, they're not. So what they are is they're ignorant. She has not done the reading, right? She hasn't.

But the arguments themselves are actually quite clever. They're quite interesting. So she may not know that Bosnia, for instance, is not in the Middle East, but she does know quite a bit. And it seems that a lot of the lessons that she's learned in the past, they're coming forth and she is learning. She expresses a desire to learn. So she's, I mean, it's very interesting. In the beginning of the movie,

Heckerling does a really smart thing with the distribution of report cards. So Cher has gotten a C in Mr. Hall's class, but that's the C that she's gotten. The implication is the other grades are great, and she's going to argue about that grade and get it up, but she's already getting an A in geometry, for instance. She is a smart person. That's a really clever choice on Amy's part because what we don't like is...

is somebody that is superficial and literally dumb in the sense that they don't have the capacity to get better or to kind of blossom into somebody wonderful. That is a limp spring to watch uncoil. Indeed. Now, we talked about this a little bit at the start, but what is so different about this character versus the classic character in a high school comedy is that she is an extrovert. She is completely forward, outward facing. She's not this misunderstood contender.

kid who's overlooked by others. She's not pretty when she takes her glasses off. She's beautiful from frame one and she's popular from frame one. And even starting with all those advantages, she still struggles. And that's a very different choice than you see in most high school comedies before this point. So we just always have to remember, just even from the inception, how different

this character is than what we usually would find in this kind of story. And what you continued to find after it came out, which is, that's kind of the story of Amy Heckerling's career. I mean, she always seemed to be ahead of the ball. Yeah. Let's talk about setting up sort of the conflicts and establishing the world. As we get into sequences, we'll talk about sort of how quickly she's able to establish this world. But, you know, it's important that we understand that Cher sees herself in a certain place in the hierarchy of the school. She defines herself in relationship to

Dion and Marie's relationship. She sees herself above all these other boys. She has this fascination with Christian. She's very much aware of her social standing and her media, but she aspires to something higher. She wants like a college boy. She perceives herself as being above these other things. And so that's a crucial thing to understand about her. And Heclen does a

Great job setting up Bryson the Kit Kat. Yeah, and she's also letting us into a world that in theory we're not familiar with. So she recognizes that Cher has to be an ambassador for Beverly Hills 1995,

where all the students have had nose jobs or are driving ridiculously fancy cars. And life is different there. So part of the comedy is just the fact that we're in this strange place. In that regard, it's kind of continuing what you saw in Beverly Hills Cop. Like, take a guy from Detroit, put him in Beverly Hills, he's going to look around and go, what the hell is this crap? So she's doing that, but she's doing that with somebody that's part of it.

And that's interesting. It's not a fish out of water. It's a fish in water. And the fish in water is showing us what the water is like.

Absolutely. So I always like to imagine like, well, what if this were a musical? What would the songs be? And so it's very easy to imagine the Welcome to the World song, the first song in most movie musicals is the Let's Set Up the World. And Heckling does a great job of setting up. This is Beverly Hills. This is the high school. This is the world and her friends. The next song would generally be her I Want song. And Cher's I Want song isn't that she wants love, isn't that she wants popularity. It's that she wants to

fix everything and fix everybody. She wants to make everything happy. And so she just has this desire to bring joy to all the people around her. So her father, you know, Ty, when she meets her, that's sort of her thing. And the realization that she's going to get to is that she actually needs to direct some of that fixing towards herself rather than always outside. That's a really good way of thinking about this. That's exactly how the musical would go. There would be a song called Beverly Hills, right?

which would be all about the insanity of it. And then she would sing a song about all the things that she wants to make better because that's what she does because she's a happy, wonderful person. She's like a Mary Poppins looking for a family. And yes, one of those things is that she does not want to see. And if I were to write the lyrics to this song, she would...

to talk about how she wanted to make her dad happy. And she wanted to bring these two teachers together. And she wanted to make this new girl as popular as she is. And she wants to fix her C. And she would keep coming back to it. I want to fix my C because she's also got this self-interest. It's there. And it is admirable. I like it. So she's not as simple as just, I'm Joan of Arc or something. It's all wrapped up in a kind of very real will to power.

And of course, and Nietzsche shows up later, which makes me so happy. Honestly, her I once saw could as well be popular from Wicked. I mean, it's essentially that's what she's trying to do. She's trying to elevate the status of someone around her and transform somebody else rather than transforming herself. Exactly.

All right, so let's take a look at how Clueless works on sort of a sequence level, because watching the movie again, I was really struck by how you can take a look at Clueless as chunks of movie, chunks of sequences. And really, there's a very clear goal for what Cher is trying to do in each of these sequences. So at moments, it can feel like, oh, it's episodic, but there really is a very careful plan behind what's going here. So...

Start with the first 10 minutes. So much gets set up in the first 10 minutes. It's just a masterclass of sort of getting information out there. So we start in Cher's house. We see her fashion sense. We meet her dad. We set up the idea of Josh, even though Josh is not around. She says, but you were hardly even married to his mother. And that was five years ago. We set up her housekeeper.

From there, we are driving. We set up her Jeep. We set up Dion, her best friend. She's my friend because we both know what it's like to have people be jealous of us.

We get to school. At school, we meet Murray. We meet Wallace Shawn, play Mr. Hall. We meet Elton, Travis, Amber. We establish that Christian is a student there, even though Christian's not going to show up yet. So smartly done. So it's not just out of the blue. We come back to the house. We set up her dead mom. We set up Josh. We meet Josh for the first time. We...

really establishes she has no idea what's going on in the world overall. And at the end of that first 10 minutes, we have her first mission statement, which is to improve her grades. And that's how it's going to set up our first montage of her trying to get her grades up when she gets her report card. It's a great first 10 minutes. It doesn't

It doesn't... There's no sense of confusion or wondering where you are. For all of the brilliant screenwriting gurus out there who are charging you money for their dumb books and their stupid advice...

Let us point out that one of the things that they say over and over is don't use voiceover. Well, how about this voiceover is constant. This movie is wall to wall voiceover. And when done well, as in this case, not only is voiceover entertaining, but it is such a good way to compress information quickly. You can learn so much from these 10 minutes because she's literally telling it to you.

and doing so in a fun way, you also get a hint from this first 10 minutes that she has a problem. She doesn't know she has a problem, but you know she has a problem. Her life, as far as she's concerned,

is perfect. So this is the acceptable imperfection I like to talk about. She's in stasis. Everything is fine. But we know she has a problem. The problem that she has is that she is not necessarily seeing the world as it actually is. Her eyes are a little closed and willfully so. Absolutely. Her voiceover, as you said at the start of the podcast, is

A lot of times it is to set up where we're going or where we came from or sort of like what the next action will be. But there's a moment in the school early on where she's walking with Dion and like Dion's audio fades and we go into her voiceover. We sort of hear her thoughts about stuff, which is so important that two things can be happening at once. We can be seeing a scene in front of us, but also be hearing her perspective on things. And that becomes an important tool that Hackerling uses throughout this move.

movie, but she has to do it early on so that it's not weird when it happens later on. Yeah. And there's a kind of an iconic moment where she's talking about and kind of delivering to you at home or in the theater what her problem is. She's saying, I don't want to date any of these boys here. They're not good enough for me, which is probably more about her just not

just being scared, right? We get something off with that. But then, of course, one of the doofy boys comes in to try and put his arm around her and she pushes him away out of frame and says, as if. So there is one of the great cinema moments. I mean, it's just burned in all of our brains.

Yeah. So incredibly great first 10 minutes getting stuff set up. Then her first real mission is to get her grades up. So this is the first problem that has been presented to our character. This is a mission she has to undertake. Her quest is to get her grades improved and not to actually do any extra work, but just to argue her way up. And so we started montage where she's

talking to her teachers about what's going on in her life. So she's talking to Julie Brown, playing her PE teacher. She's talking to Miss Geist. She's trying to convince Mr. Hall that she deserves better grades. And she's looking for a way to get Mr. Hall to budge, who seems to be the most difficult person. And that's where they had the idea of, okay, how do we get Mr. Hall to be overwhelmingly happy so that his mood will improve and therefore I can raise my grades? So it is what

What seems like a noble goal is to make this person fall in love has a selfish motive underneath it, which is to so that my grades will improve. Correct. There's almost something cynical about her approach to love. It's the way she matches clothes together in the morning in her curiously visionary touchscreen. Yes.

So there's something a little cynical. It's easy for her, right? The world actually is very easy for her. She's got it all figured out. And in a very smart, dramatic way,

What Amy does here is give Cher another easy victory. Yeah. Because the easier the victory seemed, the more shocking and distressing it will be when she doesn't get a victory. Absolutely. When her normal tricks stop working. Right. That will be devastating. So, yes, if this were a superhero movie, this would be where you see the superhero easily defeat Cher.

Exactly.

Now, next week, there's your driving lessons and Josh. So this is starting about 15 minutes into the movie. He says, he actually articulates, you know, key theme here. I've never seen you do anything that isn't 90% selfish. And then that resonates with her. And then she asked Dion the next day at school, would you call me selfish? Not to your face. And so while she's starting to question like why she's doing what she's doing, she actually does have success. And she's hailed as a hero at her school. This was really,

Yeah, I mean, simple kind of dramatic stuff here. This is somebody who only does good things for purposes that accrue to her own benefit.

It's not that she's mean about it. I mean, the things that she does are good. She does a beautiful thing for Mr. Hall and Miss Geist. But just so that, you know, their grades will improve. It's about her. And there is this other notion that maybe you could do good things when it doesn't accrue to your benefit at all.

which is when we introduced Ty. So this is, Ty's the new project. Ty, like, Sharon gets nothing out of helping Ty, really. She doesn't set out to sort of, you know, to help Ty because it's going to improve her social standing. It's like, she sort of pities her and wants to improve her social standing. So this is the Brittany Murphy character arriving,

An interesting moment that happens with Brittany Murphy's character is that she has a scene with Travis Breckenmire, which is one of the few sort of breaking POV scenes where they have this little brief moment together in the cafeteria line. And we establish like, okay, they actually probably do belong together. And we as an audience are told this and Sharon does not see it.

Yeah. And I think that this is still, I would argue this is still in the general area of not totally charitable charity because it is a project. It is fun. The idea here is a little Pygmalion-esque, unfortunately.

I'm going to rescue you and make you wonderful because that's what I can do. And Josh does essentially say, says exactly to her that she's, that Cher is treating Ty like she was a Barbie doll. And I think that's right. But at the same time, Cher also is the one person willing to do that as opposed to the meaner girls like Amber who just want to reject her. So again, fascinating line that Amy walks with Cher. She's not bad enough.

but she's not yet totally good. And it's really smartly done. Yeah. So when she says no respectable girl actually dates them, talking about stoners like Travis, Dion says it gives her a sense of control in a world filled with chaos. So that's why she's trying to make oversight for that sense of control. And it is Josh that he says, you know, you've never had a mother. So you're acting out on that poor girl like she was your Barbie doll. And so like, I think,

It's, again, so smart to tie it to the mother who's like not a character, but it's established as like an ideal, a paragon that Cher aspires to be like. She's taking care of her father the way she would if she were in the pageants, her mother would be taking care of the dad. So, again, she's aspiring to something, but kind of falling short.

She's aspiring to something. And yet also there is a kernel of fear there. And you see it come up again when, well, you don't you can't no respectable girl dates them. Well, OK, well, who does the respectable girl date in the school? Because, Sherry, you're not dating any of them. And you've written all of them off as idiots and that there must be better guys that aren't high school guys. But you're not necessarily looking for them either. Right.

It's more like you're not quite ready to...

bare your heart to someone. Exactly. So they conspire to try to set up Ty with Elton. We as an audience see that Elton really has no interest in Ty at all, that he's just playing along because he's really interested in Cher. We don't know at the start how big of a creep he is. He's really quite a creep. The sequence takes us to the party, the house party. So this is where we establish sort of like what, again, normal life is like for these kids at a valley party. Watching this

It strikes me that, you know, again, I'm looking at this as a dad, but the drinking and the hot use would be harder things, I think, to sort of get through in a PG-13 movie now than they were for Heckerling back in 95. Yeah, I'm not sure how that works exactly now, but it did strike me again that Heckerling, who was always such a great anthropologist, right?

She sat in classes at Beverly Hills High School, I believe, to just immerse herself in that. The way that she had the benefit of Cameron Crowe and Ridgemont High

So she's presented this and it seems honestly like if you change the music and the clothes, the party is not far off from what it would be now. There is a vaguely casual pot use. No one really is like, oh my God, pot. And people are drinking and no one's like, oh my God, drinking. It's just, it's fascinating how good she is at that. Agreed. So-

What's important about the party is that, again, we're seeing stuff get out of her control. And so Eldon outsmarts her in terms of figuring out who's going to ride with who. And he makes moves on her. She rejects him, gets out of the car, gets robbed at gunpoint. So she has little victories and then some big defeats. She ultimately has to call Josh to pick her up. In the car, she is...

annoyed by this girl that Josh is dating. She gets to make her Hamlet reference and prove this girl wrong. She sees, you know, from the car she watches Josh kiss the girlfriend and like feels weird about it. And so we're establishing that there's

There's a lot of things happening in that sequence. Well, it's so, it's fascinating when, and it's a really smart choice, when the chips are down. Because Cher's life is wonderful. Nothing ever goes wrong. Even the fact that she's driving around without a license and smashing into fire hydrants, nobody ever pulls her over. Yeah. I mean, she gets away with that. She has a white privilege, yeah. No, she, I mean, literally, she is the embodiment of privilege. If you made the movie now, you could call it privilege because that's what she is. She's rich and white and,

and everything and beautiful and everything goes great for her. And here something's gone terribly wrong. And what does she do? She instinctively goes for Josh. And that's a sign already. Now, if anybody at that moment watching this movie doesn't know that these two are going to end up together, they need to go home, right? Because it's obvious what happens in the car in that little moment where

Amy ships the POV to Paul Rudd and he appreciates that Cher has corrected his girlfriend on the Hamlet reference. You know what's going to happen. The fact that Cher is looking at them as they kiss and having this weird feeling that she doesn't understand, you know what's going to happen. And this is the sign of really good movies and particularly really good romances. It doesn't matter that we know. What matters is how bad we want to see it happen. And

Amy Heckerling is doing such a brilliant job of slowly increasing our desire to want to see it happen. If it happened here, we'd be like, oh, okay, not good enough.

But we want it to happen later. We're establishing that Cher may ultimately have romantic feelings, but before she has romantic feelings, she also has sexual feelings. And this is the sequence starting at page 45, 45 to 65, where we're actually talking about sex. And we establish that Cher is a virgin. We have the arrival of Christian who becomes like, well, this is...

this is obviously who she should be in love with because he's fascinating and unusual and doesn't feel like a high school boy at all. Again, we're sort of doing limited breaks of POV. We see Josh watching Cher come down and the

It's recognizing that she is a sexual character within this story, that she's not just this sort of fairytale princess. She's actually a sexual character who wants to have sex. And that is a, again, sort of a groundbreaking thing for a young woman to be the one who is trying to initiate sexual activity. And not because she's desperate or because she's, you know, ugly or that there's obstacles in the way of her having that. She could at any point have done this, but now she suddenly wants it.

Yeah, there was a storyline in the television show By Really Hills 90210, and I'm going to presume it predates this movie, where there was a whole discussion about prom night and sex.

And it was really interesting because it wasn't in the usual format of guy wants sex, girl's like, yeah. So it was happening. There's a certain refreshing frankness about how it happens here. It's a really interesting choice.

to have Ty not be a virgin at all. Yeah. And have Cher be the virgin. And also, Cher doesn't... She's just like, what's so bad about being a virgin? There's no, like... She's not hugely defensive about it. It just veers off of the normal path of how all those scenes go. There are a thousand bad scenes there, and Amy didn't write one. She wrote a really good scene. I mean, look...

The girl walks down the stairs in the dress. I'm not sure in that moment why Paul Rudd suddenly goes, oh, wow, look at her. Alicia Silverstone is so beautiful. She's so mind-numbingly beautiful in this movie.

And she's always hot. Like every outfit is hot. Every single one. So I wasn't quite sure what was going on there exactly. Other than to say, yeah, you know, okay, fine. Yeah. I think the argument would be that it caught him by surprise and that it was a more grown up beauty than sort of like the cute beauty that she is normally wearing. So she's always wearing short skirts. But this is sort of a, in the white Calvin Klein dress, it's a look that he had not seen before.

If I'm being generous. But it's also, it's movie logic. That is not how straight men work. Right. So... Oh, oh, oh, a Calvin Klein cast. Calvin Klein cast. Oh, wow, now. I mean, she's so, I mean, again, like literally mind-bogglingly beautiful in this movie. It's just a remarkable thing. And so here's his Raptors testing the fences line. How much fun would it be to have a brother type tagging along? Josh, you are not my brother. Right.

Right. So again, so this couplet does two things.

One, it establishes that like, while it's a little problematic for them to be together, it's not technically wrong for them to be together. But more importantly, we see that Josh actually is interested. Yes. And she can't read that at all. And so it's smart. It is smart. And when he says, how much fun would it be to have a brother type tagging along? What he's really saying is, you don't see me like as a brother only, right? Like I'm not technically a brother to you, am I? Because if I am, then uh-oh.

And so he gets the answer he wants. The fact that he's even asking the question means that he doesn't feel about her like she's a sister. Yep. This next sequence I will call an overwhelming sense of ickiness, which is the line she said. But it's such a crucial point. And this is sort of like...

Aline would describe as like the Rocky Shoals. This is sometimes a very difficult sequence in the movie because you're not quite at the, you know, you're not at the end of the second act yet, but there's a lot of stuff going on. This movie does this all so, so well. So there's a sequence that just often, a clip that often gets out there, which is Dion and Murray and Cher in the car and Dion's driving and like they accidentally get on the freeway. And you remember it's like, ah, we're on the freeway by accident. And it is sort of like a very natural panic for these people. But like,

that scene is actually really important, completely independent of the driving, which is Murray's like, oh no, Christian's gay. Like, you know, how could you not see this? And basically pointing out that Cher has missed a crucial fundamental thing about this. And like the light bulb and we're like, oh, that's right. It does make a lot of sense.

That scene could have happened anywhere, but by staging it in this driving scene, there's just a lot more going on. So it's taking a conversation that could take place in a high school hallway and giving it a great space to happen in. I think it's the best scene in the movie. I think it's the best scene in the movie because, as you say, A, this interesting revelation comes out, which unlocks a certain thing in Cher's mind.

But it flows into a legitimately laugh out loud set piece. And then the laugh out loud set piece proves why it deserved to be there. That it wasn't just random noise to make you laugh. The point of it was that her friends are actually in love. Yeah. And that's a huge deal. Then she understands now what love really looks like and what it means, which is basically I take care of you.

When you are scared and when you're freaked out, I calm you down and I tell you you did a really great job. These two goofs who are... Look, I mean, it seems like they're just comic relief side characters. But Deanna Murray are not just side relief comic characters. They are exemplars. Because once you strip away all the baloney of them arguing with each other about who cheated on who or him shaving his head or any of that nonsense...

They love each other. And that is such a great way to do that, to use comedy to create madness and then use the madness to create feelings and then have the feelings impact the hero. Yeah, yeah. And what Cher's feeling here is jealousy. She's jealous of their relationship. She envies what they have. And then she envies Ty because when Ty has her near-death experience where these unrealistically old men are dangling her off the edge of the...

the West Side Pavilion, and then she rescues her. She becomes like the hero of the school and Cher suddenly finds herself being sort of shoved aside. Now, that being shoved aside is like sort of like a Brady Bunch moment. Like we've seen that moment before, but it's so specific to what Cher's feeling. So that plus Deanna Murray and the relationship, she's suddenly, she's not the queen anymore. She's not on top and she...

Not only that, she wants things she doesn't have or she doesn't know how to get. And that's a very new place for Cheryl Horwitz to be at. Yeah. Her eyes are opening to what it's like to not win without even trying.

For the first time in the movie, she's walking out the door and there's a guy that she fell for. And now not only can she not get him, but she feels like an idiot for not realizing it. Her best friends are in love in a way that she's never known and might never will know. Her little Barbie doll has outstripped her. The pupil has become the master.

And she, in general, feels lost. She is no longer the person she was. This is sort of the, you know, how to make a movie podcast lesson here. She's not who she was, but she's not yet ready to be who she's supposed to be. She's lost, literally to the point of doing that classic cliche thing of walking around naked.

moping and going, what happened to me? Well, and crucially right before then, the driving test was established as an important thing that's going to be coming up. She fails the driving test spectacularly. And she's failed at something that she couldn't talk her way out of. So like her normal skills just

don't work anymore. She comes back home and she sees Ty hanging out with Josh. And Ty says like, oh, I really like Josh. I think I'm gonna start dating Josh. And like, that's just like the knife in her. But the actual words given to it are, you're a virgin who can't drive. And it's just the most brutal thing a person could say to her at that moment. Yeah. And that driving instructor is an important character because he is reality.

He might as well be called Mr. Reality because she starts another thing and he's like, oh, no, no, no, you don't understand. I'm facts and reality and you're not getting what you want. There's literally nothing in the world that's going to make that happen.

By the way, why are there so many New Yorkers just showing up? Why is this like super New York guy teaching, doing DMV tests in Beverly Hills? I don't know. I don't know. I like the choice. By the way, there's a I forgot to mention also just sometimes I I kick out like weird things that we have changed in terms of the way movies are made.

And this is just off the topic of the writing. There's a party scene at the concert, you know, when she's still trying to seduce Christian and all the rest of it. And it opens on a band and they're playing. And then, you know, classic sort of techno crane pullback to reveal the crowd dancing. And you hear footsteps. They folied in like weird shuffley footsteps as if anyone could hear footsteps from

In the middle of a concert, yeah. It was such a... And it just reminded me like, yeah, they used to do stuff like that because I guess just like the Foley people were out of their minds and nobody was paying attention. It's like, it's amazing. I love stuff like that. And then we get to our last big sequence, which is the realization. So this is Cher walking through Beverly Hills and suddenly realizing, oh my God, I love Josh. And so this is a moment where

but the voiceover and reality sort of merge and what her thoughts in her head actually give voice to that she actually does love josh but what does she do with that information she goes to her father asking for advice not specifically about josh but sort of in general like this theoretical guy watching the movie again i was struck by sort of how much um the father is aware of like the josh you know romance from the very start from the josh he sees

he sees the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. He's like the, that classic mentor characters already seen the movie. So he has no problem playing his role. But I mean, when Josh says, I'm going to go to that party and make sure she's okay. He's just, Dan Hedega is his little smile after like, I know what's going on. Pretty, pretty classic. And also a little weird considering that it's the second one, but whatever. And so Cher's decision, her resolution is that this time I'm going to make over my soul. And which is kind of,

kind of, it's the thing that she needed to realize from the start is that she actually needs to direct that

desire to fix and improve people to herself and to look for the things she can do to help other people that have no gain for her own self. And so it's still funny because she doesn't necessarily have a good sense of it. She doesn't know that these people don't need her water skis, but she does have a sense of she's trying to improve herself in ways that we've not seen before. She is. And she's trying to make amends as well. Right. And she's not doing it

to try and get Josh. Yes. She's just doing it. She doesn't expect that she can have Josh. What she considers is that she's just not been correct. She finally embraces the new way of being and becomes that person. And Travis is doing the same thing. He's making amends. He's going to 12 steps. People are growing up and changing. The important thing is that she's using her powers to

to fix things that are not going to accrue to her benefit at all. Very much, very much like what Bill Murray is doing in Groundhog Day when he finally accepts it and he just starts taking piano lessons and helping the elderly. You know what I mean? It's just, he just starts to do things to help people no matter what, just because. Yep.

I think it's also important, the reconciliation with Ty. It's not all Cher apologizing. Ty recognizes that she messed up too, and they come to a place in the middle rather than Cher having to go all the way to Ty. So again, smart choices, recognizing these characters are human and are not simply heroes or villains at the time.

it's more complicated between those characters. Yeah. And then we finally get to the scene with Josh. So this is the scene on the staircase, which is a much longer scene than I remember it being. It's a long conversation between the two of them, really smartly done, held mostly in close-ups and matching close-ups, much more naturalistic dialogue than usual. And finally gets to, like,

are you saying you care about me? And they get in for the kiss. And it's what you're hoping for. She maintains suspense through it. You don't know quite enough how we're going to get to this kiss. You assume what's going to happen. And then if it does happen, it is just right. But then we have our Lindsay Duran moment that it doesn't just end on the kiss. Well, before we go past the kiss, I have to say,

I cried. And the question is, why? Like, why would I cry there? And in thinking about it, it was Alicia Silverstone's face as she finally understood that she was loved. And that was amazing. And she did such a beautiful job. This is a character who I think appreciated that she was popular. She was liked. Boys were attracted to her.

but she was missing love. And she gets it from this guy who she admires so much and who she was not expecting to love her. And it happens after she screws up again.

So there's this point where, I mean, by the way, also just logically makes no sense. So they're working, they're helping dad on his lawsuit. He's not there. So it's her and it's Josh and then the world's worst law associate who yells at her because she's mislabeled something. Meanwhile, I'm like, dude, you work for her dad. What are you doing, man? Like you're calling her an idiot and stupid. You're not going to have a job tomorrow. But

But regardless, he's there to do that so that Josh can defend Cher, but also to bring Cher low. And it's really important that that happens. Because if not, then Josh walks up to her and says, you know what? I've noticed you doing all these wonderful things. You're great. Let's kiss. And then they kiss. And you're like, okay.

But he does it when she is at maybe her lowest lowest. Yeah. She's in tears and she's failed despite trying to do good things. And that's when he lets her know that he loves her anyway. And that's to me, that's,

why I cried. And her face, when she realizes it, is so perfect. And her, oh, those big eyes are just like, you just feel for her. It's such a good scene. Yeah, it's really well done. And you're absolutely right. Without the set up to that stare moment, it has a tenth the impact. You don't see that, oh,

The point of a romantic relationship is that that person is also there for you when you're down. Right. You are Dion who's just gotten off the freeway. That's when you need that relationship. And to have somebody who's watching out for you at those moments is so crucial. Yeah.

So I was going to say the Lindsay Duran moment, her logic is always that it's not about winning the football game. It's about the moment after you win a football game where you sort of celebrate the success you've had. The relationship. Yeah. So that is this wedding and which also ties up other sort of loose ends. So we get to see Mr. Hall and Miss Geis get married. Yeah, which is nice. You get to see sort of

sort of a normal order restored. So it's a beautiful party. Everyone looks great. Everyone's dressed up. It's a quick resolution. She catches the bouquet. It feels like a good kind of dot, dot, dot. It's not sort of, you know, and from this moment forward, everything would be perfect. It feels like everyone's where they need to be at the end of this.

Yeah. I mean, the people who are supposed to be together are together. It's a very conventional ending. It is. It's not actually adding anything. If you think about it, you could have ended the movie on the two of them kissing. But it's a comedy and comedies need a little bit of a joke at the end.

And so there's a little bit of a joke. You know, I'm bugging too. Paul Rudd doing his best. I'm a white guy. And so there's a little bit of just laughter and a kind of way to kind of gently ease you out so that you go out of the theater with a smile and laughing. It's basically, literally, I think she gave people a moment to get the hankies out, wipe away the tears and smile again. And it was a smart choice in that regard. But still, and always with the relationship, final shot, the two of them kissing, perfect. Yeah.

Clueless, written and directed by Amy Heckerling.

Such a fantastic movie. So thank you, Craig, for this nice deep dive. Thank you. On Clueless, it will remain one of my favorite movies. I suspect when we look at this 10 years, 20 years down the road, it will still hold up as just a really great, not even a time capsule. It doesn't feel so 95. It just feels like this is this kind of relationship story and we'll have the same lessons no matter when you listen to this podcast. I mean, if it can hold up after 25 years, I think it's a permanent hold up. I agree. Yeah.

I do have one cool thing. Oh, yeah. My one cool thing, it's in the folder, Craig, so you can take a listen to it. Have you heard of 8D Sound? Do you know about 8D Sound? No. So 8D Sound is a way of mixing sound so that it feels like it's spatially oriented in a very different way. So it's the same way that augmented reality will give you a sense of place and space. This does it for sound. So take a listen to the clip I have in there. It's actually a sample from a Billie Eilish song. Okay. And we're going to play a sample of it right now.

okay wow

Craig, what did you think? I mean, that's astonishing. Isn't it? Wow. So Ryan Knighton, who's a frequent ScriptNance guest, sent me that clip. And so Ryan's blind, and he said, like, it was a really amazing experience for him because he felt his eyes tracking to sort of follow the sound. Mm-hmm.

So in a way, it feels like cheating because sometimes it is just panning things from one side to another side, but you only have two ears. So you ultimately are doing that all the time. Your brain is figuring out where things must be in space based on the timing between when different ears hear things. So again, this probably

probably only works in headphones. So if people are using this in your car, it probably isn't doing quite the same thing. Right. But it's just remarkable. That is amazing. It's not, the panning part is the panning part, but what that does that I've never experienced before is create distance without reducing volume.

When I first played it, I thought, oh no, I must be playing this through my phone rather than through my headphones because I could hear it off in the distance. Oh wait, no, it is here in my head. Yeah, so it feels like you're hearing something at full volume, but that full volume is halfway across the room. That is weird. Isn't that wild? That how it places it psychologically far from you, that's the part that is kind of mind-blowing. That is cool.

Yeah, so obviously we work in Hollywood and we work with some of the greatest sound designers and technicians. So this kind of stuff is not new to them. And if you look at Alfonso Cuaron's recent films, he does this kind of stuff where he puts things in really interesting places in the room, but I just never heard it in something in my headphones done so remarkably well. Wow, great. It's a great technique. Beautiful. Why two cool things this week? Not one, but two cool things, which is...

Normally, I have zero, so this is a big deal for me. So one of them is something that anyone can get, and one of them is something that only a few people can get. So hence, two cool things. We'll start with the easy one that anyone can get. John, how are your hands doing? My hands are dry, so I have a hand cream that is in front of me now that I'm going to apply while you tell me about your solution. Okay. Okay.

So everyone's hands are getting battered. The backs of my hands were the, because I'm thinking that over the course of my life, I maybe washed the backs of my hands thoroughly about twice, right? I mean, it's like never knew that that was part of the whole thing. But now, of course, we have to. They were getting super itchy and sort of rashy to the point where I was dreading washing my hands, which obviously is not an option right now.

So I went around poking around looking for good solutions. And I landed on a product called O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream.

It is for sale on the Amazon and that's O-K-E-E-F-F-E. O keeps working against hand cream. Here's why I love this stuff so much. A, it has no smell. None. Zero. It smells like air. That is so important to me. I hate the stuff that smells. I hate it when it smells and I hate it when they, when it doesn't have added perfume, it just smells like weird goop. Yeah. No smell. Two,

You use very little of it and it's not a squirty cream. I am so grossed out by anything that feels oily and kind of lotiony. This stuff is the texture more of like an Oreo filling kind of. So you take just a little bit and you rub it in and it disappears pretty quickly. It doesn't leave you all greasy and nasty. It doesn't have a smell. It literally just disappears. And the next morning...

perfect, like cured. Nice. And so I do this once every night. It works so well. I love it so much. So if you're having trouble with your hands and you're looking for a solution, O'Keefe's Working Hands Hand Cream, it costs $12.33. And given the, oh, and that's for a two pack. And given the amount that you use, which is tiny, I think it should last you a lifetime.

So I think yours is going to be, I'm going to try yours, but I also want to recommend, this was going to be my one cool thing. And I forgot to mention it last time. My friends, Aaron Gibson and Brian Safi recommended this hand cream months ago. So I already had it before I needed to wash my hands all the time. It's this fancy French thing. It's called Creme Mère Hydrant Extrapur. And it does have some smell to it. It's Mediterranean. So it has like this really like slight ocean smell to it, which I actually really like a lot. So I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. Excellent.

Either way, your hands will be covered. Okay, now for the very few of you

that have a VR headset. I mentioned the Quest, I think, on here, right? The Oculus Quest. Yeah, yeah. Is that one of my one cool things? It was. So it's fun. I like playing Beat Saber. It's very cool. There's some cool things like, oh, you know, the roller coaster thing, which makes me want to puke, and so I turn it off. But, like, it's pretty cool. But it's not like the kind of thing where I've been like, ooh, I can't wait to get my Oculus Quest on my head. Until now. Oh, my God. John.

Do you know who has made a game for the Oculus? I do not. Is it South Park? Who is it? Fireproof Games. Oh, nice. And they make The Room, which as everyone knows, it's my favorite. So The Room VR, A Dark Matter. Right. This thing blows me away. I've only played two chapters so far.

mind-bogglingly beautiful. The gameplay is just classic room gameplay, so it's very clever. It's puzzles. It's fun to reach out with your hand and pull a lever as opposed to pressing a thing to pull a lever. But what blows my mind is how real it is. It is disturbing. And this little touch is the thing that kind of freaks me out the most. You

You get notes, little like handwritten notes on a piece of paper and you pick it up with your hand and lift it to your face to read it just like a regular note. And it looks so real. And the paper like flutters as you move it back and forth. And there's like a watermark in the paper if you look close enough. It's so mind-blowingly, incredibly real. And it just, for the first time I go, okay, this is where it'll all be.

It's going to be fits and starts. There's going to be blind alleys. There's going to be mistakes. But eventually, this is going to be it. We're going to be inside of things. It's just too compelling and too remarkable. So anyway, if you have a VR headset, for the love of God, download the RoomVR Dark Matter immediately.

Great. Well, that is our show for this week. Stick around after the credits because we will be doing a special feature on how we learn to drive or teaching people to drive for our premium members. But Script Notes is produced by Megan Arrau. Yay! It is edited by Matthew Shillelagh. Yes. Our outro is by Ryan Dunn. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That's also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is at CLMason. I'm at johnaugust.com.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnhawks.com. That's also where you'll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we're about to record. Craig, thank you for talking about Clueless with me. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure.